Content Section

Comment on Harrison C. White’s/2

Abstract

The 1/2008 edition of Sociologica contains a reprint of Harrison White’s classical “Notes on the Constituents of Social Structure” alongside explanatory notes. This short memo offers a glimpse into the rewriting process of White’s Identity and Control and points out how stable this theory has been over 40 years. Three core concepts already present in the Notes are singled out, namely social space-time, the duality of emergence and constraint, and scale-invariance. Finally, it is argued that Identity and Control can contribute much to integrating insights from social science and complexity science.